Engaged Scholarship

In 2007 the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching awarded the University of Kentucky the designation of “Engaged University” for its outreach and partnership activities.

According to the Carnegie criteria, engaged scholarship is about working together with communities to solve problems and improve quality of life, on the ground. It recognizes that the collective knowledge of a system, not just expert knowledge, is essential for understanding any issue and for creating effective solutions to difficult social problems.1   It is carried out in long-term partnerships with multiple, diverse stakeholders and deals with complex issues that may be constantly changing and evolving.   The work may occur episodically, but the engagement is long-term and seeks long term impact. Engaged scholarship may take many forms, including action research, civic capacity building, policy analysis, program evaluation, translational research and technical assistance.2    

Even when there is a commitment to engaging community partners in scholarly endeavors, academic tradition can create barriers that make engaged scholarship difficult to carryout.  In its most robust form, engaged scholarship asks researchers to enter into reciprocal learning and problem-solving with community partners to produce a knowledge that is more insightful and more useful than knowledge produced by scholars working alone.  In practical terms this means that community partners are involved in every step of exploration, from identifying questions of real-world importance, conceptualizing, designing and implementing the inquiry, through analysis, interpretation and dissemination of results.

Inside the academy, we often find ourselves working in “silos.” Engaged scholarship is, by its nature, boundary-spanning.  It crosses the boundaries between disciplines, between inquiry and teaching, and between the academy and the community.  In forming new interdisciplinary research teams to answer questions related to our Growing Local Economies Initiative, we are challenging ourselves to embrace the Center’s history of action research and assure that Center scholarship is engaged scholarship that reflects collaborative learning with our community partners.

1 For more on engaged scholarship visit Campus Compact - Research University Engaged Scholarship Toolkit; Gibson, C.M. (n.d.).  Research Universities and Engaged Scholarship: a Leadership Agenda for Renewing the Civic Mission of Higher Education.
2 Church, R. L., Zimmerman, D. L., Bargerstock, B. A., Kenney, P. A. (2003).  Measuring Scholarly Outreach at Michigan State University—Definition, Challenges, Tools.  http://schoe.coe.uga.edu/benchmarking/msu.pdf (PDF) Get Adobe Reader